“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” We are living through the single greatest crisis in the history of, dare i say, anything. Everything is at stake; everyone you know is in peril together with entire multitudes of peoples you have barely heard from, united only by their shared humanity. In our time, the only salvation is socialism, the cause of our humanity; the only thing that can lift the weight, even if just a little, off the neck of an already stifling planet. Any attempt, whether as an outgrowth from our inexperience or as the result of purposeful misdirection and deception, is tantamount to complicity in this coming Holocaust, of co-signing the pillaging, sacking and despoiling of this planet. “Not a step back” can be allowed; it is “socialism or barbarism”, and if the former surrenders before the two have even come to blows, then we are truly doomed.
Even if, and the “if” is stressed here, humanity (and by our will the entirety of life as we know it) were dried, burned and had every trace erased by unsentimental waves of who-knows-what from space: what is to be done then, nothing? Do you read the works of the great socialist thinkers as if they were novels, as if they were immaterial entertainment to be forgotten at even the smallest resistance from the powers that be? As poetic and bittersweet as it may be, I think Lenin and Marx's contribution to humanity should reach beyond a simple epitaph on its gravestone. Our goal is to change society, not to write “Marx was here” on the changing sands, to be forgotten by the rising tide.
This was written as a reaction to the response to this post
Couldn't figure out where to fit this in the text...
“Man's dearest possession is life. It is given to him but once, and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying, he might say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world──the fight for the Liberation of Mankind”
